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<title>How Long Till my Soul Gets it Right by partyghost (Arokel)</title>
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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28078488">How Long Till my Soul Gets it Right</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arokel/pseuds/partyghost'>partyghost (Arokel)</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Julie and The Phantoms (TV)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Canonical Character Death, I guess this is a songfic? I've never written one before, Light Angst, M/M, Minor Alex/Willie (Julie and The Phantoms), Outer Space, Willie Backstory (Julie and The Phantoms), Willie character study, all poetry no plot, but not like actual poetry, heavily inspired by the indigo girls</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-12-14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-12-14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-10 18:28:56</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,351</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28078488</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arokel/pseuds/partyghost</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>As he lay on the pavement, dazed and aching, he heard the paramedic's voice catch on <i>stupid kids</i> and thought <i>no, I'm not stupid; someday I'm going to figure out how the universe works.</i></p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Alex &amp; Willie (Julie and The Phantoms)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>71</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>How Long Till my Soul Gets it Right</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>this is like... an option for Willie's backstory I guess? I just really really like <i>Galileo</i> by the Indigo Girls and this is the result of that obsession.</p><p>(for the purposes of this fic Willie died in 1991 at 19 years old, because I needed him to be born in 1972)</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p><em>and then I think about my fear of motion<br/>
</em> <em>which I never could explain<br/>
some other fool across the ocean years ago<br/>
must have crashed his little airplane</em></p><p>Willie had loved the night sky.</p><p>At eight years old and still afraid of the dark, he insisted on keeping his curtains open at night so he could watch the moon and imagine he could see the stars through the smog. He liked the way the dark expanse of sky made him feel small, insignificant, part of something so much larger than him. He liked feeling that if he went outside, the night might swallow him up and take him up into the sky, make him a constellation like the ones he carefully traced onto his ceiling with glow-in-the-dark stars: <em>Aries, the ram; Cassiopeia, the queen; Lyra, the harp; William, the stargazer.</em></p><p>By the time Willie was ten he had come to realize that when adults asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, it wasn’t enough to tell them how <em>big </em>the universe was, how he had stared and stared at his dad’s copy of the Whole Earth catalogue with the blue and white marble on it, so much realer than the bumpy, color-coded globes in his classrooms, and thought <em>I came into the world at the same time as this, and that means something. </em>That, as a young person, when you told people you wanted to be an astronomer and they laughed and patted you on the head and said <em>I think you mean astronaut, </em>it was easier not to correct them.</p><p>When Willie was thirteen, he watched with elementary school kids around the nation as Christa McAuliff became the first teacher sent into space and didn’t care that he was too old to be excited about it, and as he watched the <em>Challenger </em>break apart in earth’s atmosphere and come crashing back down, he felt the loss of innocence as strongly as any child with stars on his ceiling, his own certainty in the fairness of life gone up in flames just like the doomed shuttle.</p><p>By the time Willie was fifteen he had learned to hide his passions, to dress like the skater he was and keep his mouth shut when adults called him lazy or unmotivated under their breath, not to say <em>I’m neither of those things; I have passions and I study hard and when I grow up I’m going to go to Stanford and become an astronomer and maybe I’ll get to name a galaxy, </em>painted constellations on his board and didn’t correct his friends when they said <em>cool, a lightning bolt</em>, even when his mind screamed out <em>no, it’s Lacerta, it means lizard, and one day I’m going to discover a star right next to it.</em></p><p>When Willie was seventeen, a girl in his calculus class asked him out, and the self-preservation he had learned from years of <em>I think you mean astronaut </em>taught him to say <em>I’m really busy, you know, college applications are kicking my ass, </em>to smile and say <em>I’m gonna grow up to be a crazy old scientist, no girl wants that </em>when his skater buddies ribbed him for it.</p><p>When Willie was eighteen and anxiously awaiting the envelope in the mail that would decide his future, waiting just as anxiously for the first picture from the Hubble telescope, it felt like fate that the newspaper arrived on his doorstep in May alongside that thick Stanford letter, the front page a  newsprint-black void filled with television static. It felt like a sign, like the picture of earth on a magazine cover from the day he was born, a confirmation that this was where his life was headed. This was what he was going to do with the rest of it.</p><p>When Willie was nineteen, as he lay on the pavement, dazed and aching, his vision filling with static like that front-page picture, he heard the paramedic’s voice catch on a whispered <em>stupid kids </em>and thought <em>no, I’m not stupid, I go to Stanford and I’m going to be an astronomer and someday when I’m grown up I’ll know how the universe works. </em>And then he didn’t think anything.</p><p>After Willie had left his body behind in the too-bright hospital and walked out into the even brighter day, the first thing he did was paint over the stars on his board.</p>
<hr/><p>Willie had been dead for four years when he met Caleb.</p><p>He had haunted the halls of Stanford for as long as he could stand, sat in on the classes he would have taken and thought none of it made sense, anymore, because physics couldn’t explain what he was or why he was still there, so how could it explain anything else? And then the friends who had mourned him grew up and graduated and left, and Willie didn’t.</p><p>So when Caleb Covington said <em>I can show you the secrets of the universe</em>, Willie said yes.</p><p>And of course that wasn’t true, so Willie skated down Hollywood Boulevard and tried not to think it was ironic, passing over a sidewalk full of stars without ever touching, as if they hadn’t ever meant anything to him.</p><p>And he didn’t talk about the stars anymore, because there was no one to say it to, and when lifers struck up conversations with him at Caleb’s club he played pretty and dumb until they walked away thinking <em>what a charming young man; how peaceful the afterlife must be </em>and not <em>here is a boy who could have figured out the universe; what a curse it must be to exist with that ambition forever unfulfilled, </em>always waiting for something he couldn't see and couldn't name.</p><p>Willie had been dead for twenty-nine years when he met Alex.</p><p>Alex was beautiful, and bright, and <em>alive </em>in a way Willie couldn’t ever remember having been, even before his death. Alex didn’t live in a world of <em>when I grow up</em>; he took the future in both hands and pulled it toward him with all the inevitability of gravity. <em>You guys were gonna be legends</em>, Willie said, and he didn’t say <em>stars.</em></p><p>And Alex liked Willie, too, for reasons Willie couldn’t fathom any more than he could fathom why they were both there. But years of playing pretty and dumb had taught him to say <em>I’m just not looking for anything right now; just let me grow up first,</em> so Willie sat and didn’t say the things Alex made him want to say and let himself catalogue every part of Alex’s face like a star chart, searching for the one look or smile he could discover and say, <em>that one’s mine; that one belongs to me.</em></p><p>And the thing he wanted the most, more even than he had wanted to name a constellation before he had learned how bright Alex’s eyes were in the reflected neon of the Orpheum’s marquee, was to see Alex wink out of existence like a supernova, to go wherever you go when you leave the plane of existence whose secrets Willie had once been so sure he could unravel. <em>I still haven’t found mine yet, </em>he said, and didn’t say that he worried he never would, because how could one person understand the universe?</p><p>And though he felt an overwhelming relief to know that Alex was freed from the cursed half-life Willie had nearly dragged him into, it still felt in some small way like another loss. <em>You guys could have been stars</em>, he said, and didn’t add <em>and I would have searched for you in the night sky, and that would almost be worth losing you. </em>Willie had always been destined to be stationary while the rest of the world spun around him; Alex was destined to spin and pull and move and move <em>on</em>. That he hadn’t was as crushing as watching the <em>Challenger </em>fall back to earth, doomed and unfulfilled.</p><p>So when Alex said <em>maybe we were always meant to meet each other; maybe you’re supposed to figure this out, </em>it felt like the universe settling back into place.</p>
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